[thedoc (OP)]

JS Hattingh asked the Naked Scientists:
   Good day dear Scientists,

Please tell me why I loose my sense of direction whenever I travel from SA  to the Northern Hemisphere. Will it get better after a while?

Thank you.

Mrs S. Hattingh
What do you think?

[evan_au]

I think I instinctively navigate by the Sun (when it is visible). I live in the Southern hemisphere, so the first time I traveled to the USA, I felt a distinct bout of vertigo when I took a daytime flight from Los Angeles to New York with a window seat.

It wouldn't be a problem today with universal GPS, but I often found myself turning left instead of right, I think for the same reason. (Driving on the other side of the road didn't help, either...)

I found that it got better after a week or so, but I still sometimes made snap decisions that were wrong.
Later I spent a whole year in Europe, and quickly became accustomed to it (probably helped by the frequent cloud cover in that part of the world).

[alancalverd]

Agreed. I don't get lost driving in Australasia as I don't know where anywhere is anyway, so I rely on maps, road signs and GPS, but visual flying is weird with the sun in the north and the compass turning and acceleration errors reversed!

[Zot]

Hi. I just discovered this post now when googling this topic. A few years ago I travelled from Canada to Australia. I pride myself on having an excellent sense of direction, but when I arrived in Sydney I was completely disoriented and kept thinking east was west, and north was south. It felt very strange. But after about three days, something clicked, and everything was normal again. My brain must have adjusted somehow. I still don't understand how this works, but this is the first discussion I have seen about it. I speculate that the brain subconsciously uses time and the angle of the sun to determine the direction and that this process gets messed up in the other hemisphere.

[Hayseed]

Handedness equator inversion.